One of the books that most influenced Socrates Rosenfeld, CEO of cannabis e-commerce platform Jane Technologies, is “The Infinite Game” by Simon Sinek. In the book, Sinek splits the different games that humans play into two categories: finite, and infinite.

For a long time, Rosenfeld says, business has been treated like sports where the rules dictate there be a clear winner and clear loser after the match has been played. “Unfortunately, we’ve been made to believe that capitalism is this finite resource, but actually it’s not,” Rosenfeld tells Cannabis Business Executive. “It’s infinite.” This philosophy guides him as he makes his vision for Jane Technologies a reality because he’s seen the consequences of the opposite.

In 2011, Rosenfeld was studying “why tech companies succeed and how they shape new industries” at MIT. They reviewed case studies of Amazon’s takeover of the market in 1999, as well as Uber, Airbnb, and other disruptive tech companies. What he learned there was “if you can time a market out, you can do some things that no other company could have done because you’re coming in with a fresh set of eyes,” he says. An Army veteran, it’s also while at MIT that he discovered cannabis, discovering that the plant “was something that really brought me back home.” 

Additional real-world problems manifested themselves during his time as a consultant at McKinsey & Co. following his time at MIT, where “it seemed like every project that I was put on was for a tech company that was trying to defend against Amazon, or it was a brick and mortar store that was also trying to defend against Amazon,” he continues. “What I saw was the tech companies were winning. They got the funding. They made all the money. But it was at the expense of the restaurant or the flower shop. Amazon would win, but retailers would lose.”

Marrying the lessons from his business education and professional experience with his personal cannabis story, Rosenfeld incorporated Jane Technologies in 2015 and officially launched the company in 2017. “We saw in the cannabis industry an opportunity to redefine what e-commerce was,” he says.

Rather than trying to get the biggest piece of the cannabis pie, Rosenfeld and Jane want to make the pie as big as possible so that as many businesses can enjoy success. “At the simplest form what we’re trying to do at Jane is provide digital tooling that expands the access to this plant for those that need it,” Rosenfeld says. “But in order for us to do that, we are really providing and building the digital infrastructure upon which retailers can grow and digitize their business.”

Jane’s Technology

From a technology side, Jane pitches itself not as a simple digital marketplace, but as a partner that can help “expand the reach of your digital footprint,” the CEO says. Leveraging its nine software patents, Jane’s platform “can go in through a remote integration in real time [with] the point of sale, extract all the live inventory, and then push that live inventory across different websites: a dispensary’s website, a brand website, our app, Leafly… So it’s all fully automated.”

Rather than look for cannabis products by visiting individual store sites (like one might traditionally shop for a restaurant), Jane functions like an Amazon marketplace, allowing consumers to go online, search for a product, and see availability and pricing by vendor. So far, Jane has built a North American product catalog of nearly 2 million SKUs that includes product names, taxonomy, serving size, images, and verified reviews. More important than the data collection is the data cleaning that Jane does, Rosenfeld stresses, which allows the system to automatically correct human input errors in listings.

For retailers who might be hesitant about joining a platform where their products are displayed alongside (and priced compared against) other dispensaries’ wares, Rosenfeld does acknowledge there needs to be a trust factor, but also that Jane has a strong track record in this young industry.

“We spent five years earning the trust of these retailers, Rosenfeld says. Retailers are “realizing that we’re not a competitor. When we make money, it’s not because they make money, meaning we take a 30% take rate or we jam up their listing service. It’s, ‘Hey guys, let’s help you be more successful. Let’s help you grow your business so that this benefits our ecosystem.’ … Sure, you could say, ‘I don’t wanna join any kind of marketplace or platform. I want all [traffic to] my website.’ Well, how are you getting new people into your website? Let us help you do that.”

There are other incentives that Jane offers, including free data analytics on customers, allowing retailers to identify consumer behavior trends and improve their marketing to various consumer segments. “When I walk into a store and I [buy] a product, all the store really knows is this is who I was and this is what I ultimately bought,” Rosenfeld explains. “But they don’t really understand what did I search for? What else did I put in my cart? What did I take out? When I’m not shopping at that store, where am I going? What else am I buying? Did I leave a review? Did I shop for this again and again and again? So all that information is what we anonymize … and then we give it back to the stores.”

And for retailers with a unique brand voice or store experience who are concerned about a cookie-cutter-looking marketplace on their website, the company offers Jane Roots, a headless e-commerce platform. Through Jane Roots, the company will assemble the back end of the platform, including integrations, product catalogs, data cleansing, deals, discounts, pricing, and taxation. “Then these stores can now build a bespoke, custom front-end experience for their consumers without having to really spend the past six years doing what we’re doing,” Rosenfeld says.

Advertising That Pays Back

Jane Technologies charges a $300 monthly SaaS fee–retailers don’t have to worry about additional setup or equipment charges. Jane has additional revenue streams via digital advertising. Brands can pay Jane to advertise their products on the marketplace, similar to product placement fees in a brick-and-mortar operation.

Instead of charging a listing fee, Jane is building an advertising platform whose goal is to evolve into a Google Ads-type platform. By tracking customer purchases and decisions made in the marketplace, Jane can segment consumers by product preferences, desired effects, price points, and more. For example, a consumer who has shown a preference for gluten-free edibles that help with sleep can be shown a promoted brand product that suits their needs and is available in a local dispensary.

Because the ad is curated, “it increases the conversion [by] over 400%,” Rosenfeld details. “So the brand is now happy because we’re democratizing where their digital advertisements go. It’s not just, ‘I have to outspend my competitors over everyone because I’m a gummy brand, but I have to outspend a flower brand and a beverage brand, and all these just to get to the top of the menu.’ Now it’s ‘can I invest in different segments and demographics and then only show my brand when that consumer has a high propensity to purchase that product?’”

To further incentivize retailers to participate in the marketplace, Jane also shares part of that brand advertising revenue with the dispensary that completes the sale. The advertising revenue has grown 300% year-over-year, Rosenfeld says, “so now the store is making money in the form of tens of thousands of dollars a month in some instances [by] basically creating a space for brands to advertise on.”

Conscious Capitalism

This “infinite game” approach is what Rosenfeld describes as “conscious capitalism” that replaces the winner-take-all mentality of old. Jane is setting out to prove “that actually we can make a lot of money, we can win, we can help people, things can grow, and we don’t have to play this very limiting game of trying to beat everybody along the way,” the CEO explains.

Evidence of this approach can be found in the company’s 150+ integrations with other software companies, and more prominently in how Jane entered the Canadian market in July 2021 through a partnership with High Tide, one of Canada’s largest retail-focused cannabis corporations. Through this partnership, High Tide will be using Jane Roots in conjunction with Shopify. This integration allows Canadian retailers to continue using Shopify as their front-end branded user interface while Jane manages the back end. 

With a solid grasp on its core e-commerce vertical, Rosenfeld is starting to turn his eye to how Jane can be a value-add in the brick-and-mortar space. Online sales account for “about 40% of a throughput at a store,” he quips, “but then six out of 10 are in-store. So there’s gonna be some things in-store that we’re gonna look to go and expand our business and continue to marry the online and offline world … like get deeper and deeper within e-commerce, but [also] expand out into advertising and payments and in-store infrastructure and other really exciting things that we can do.”